Faust

I decide about 6:30 PM to roll out of my room at the University of London residence halls...the same one I occupied in June...for a quick machiatto across the street. Naturally, I head for Apostrophe's outpost in Brunswick Square, a UK fast-coffee chain. Ordering a drink is so easy...single or double...but paying for it drives me half out of my mind. For the purposes of this very quick caffeine stop, my bum bag, a.k.a., fanny pack, is resting on my lap. This makes it easier than usual to unzip the thing and rummage around for coins. But I can't find them. Only a couple of hours ago, Eliot, Jake and I rolled off the fast train from Edinburgh, so I am heavily laden with passport, US and UK mobile phones, and now I am pulling all of these out of the bag, conscious that the counter person has just presented me with the amount due, £1.40, and time is passing, and only a very disabled person who is totally and obviously out of it, would interrupt the urban rhythm in such a stupid way.... And what is so maddening is that only a few hours ago aboard that express for Kings Cross, I gave a girl pushing the tea trolley a £5 note and got plenty of change, and now I cannot find any of that change, the coins having drifted into some dark corner of the pouch. I can hear the change when I shake the thing, but I cannot feel. And with my neurology, discerning pound coins from 20-pence coins or from aardvarks is impossible. Well, maybe a small aardvark. Finally, I spot a £2 coin, hand it to the barista, and roll out to the terrace to drink my coffee in the London evening.

Everything is so hard, or everything is so infuriating, that I sail into negative emotional territory and quickly get stranded in the shallows. There is no logical thinking through of the coin-management problem. A small purse or something, for example. In fact, I do not seem to care. Everything is hard, I expect this, and I get angry at myself, all day long. Of course, there are respites. If there weren't, I would probably get run over by a cab.

This afternoon, Jake and Elliot having helped me get unpacked and situated in my dorm-home-away-from-home, I rotated my feet up on the bed...an infuriating maneuver, one must point out, the bed being pointed the wrong way and forcing me to lift bad leg first, not the kosher quadriplegic way...but despite berating myself for being a bumbling idiot, the legs did get up on the bed, and I had a sort of nap. Interrupted by a cousin's phone call, but never mind. There was a precious 30 minutes of reflection.

And into such voids, comes the unfinished business of Marlou's death. Particularly, her last night on earth. When she considered then rejected terminal sedation, a nurse took her through a fantasy walk of Oahu's Windward Coast. And the same nurse talked to me in the living room beforehand, explaining in about 30 seconds that Marlou's anger could be masking fear. And then there was the bedside musing about the warm sands and the rippling water and how the sun felt on one's hair. And that may have been when Marlou let go. She woke up, or did not wake up, the following morning in a coma. With death in the afternoon.

And why I am fitting these pieces together is anyone's guess. It pains me to imagine her fear, for I can imagine my own. It pains me to acknowledge my helplessness. And that was the end. And now life goes on, or a semblance, and at least there is motion.

I wasn't quite prepared for the beauty of the rail journey south. National Rail's east coast line rolls right along the North Sea for mile after mile, hundred-foot cliffs tumbling off to the side, and nothing out there but an imaginary Holland...or maybe southern Denmark. There are even a few forests, a Scottish village or two, then Northern England, with a look at the great rivers, the Tyne and the Tee. While I work my way through a novel, and on one occasion roll into the disabled toilet.

Even with abundant grab bars, peeing is a terrifying experience. The train is going more than 100 mph, and even when it isn't jerking, the sheer centrifugal force makes a mockery of the peeing process. In these moments I abandon my mad plan to, with the help of Jake and Elliot, make my way down the perilous aisles on foot to the dining car. This is not going to happen, and that knowledge saddens me. I am getting older, everything is getting harder, walls closing in, possibilities closed off.

Except that later that afternoon, crutching down the hallway of the residence hall with Jake and Elliot standing by, I get not only my day's modest ration of exercise, but do a little something for my balance. I have hardly walked anywhere on this trip. My physiotherapist keeps telling me to get up on my feet, grab the crutch and use it before I lose it. And the wisdom of this becomes apparent in the hallway. More walking would help. There is still something I can do to make things better. All hope is not lost.

The Guardian I picked up in Edinburgh had a long feature about the previous evening's Faust. Direct from Bucharest, with a cast of more than 100, a vast production that fills an enormous stage and spills out into a large area behind the stage.... But I am getting ahead of things. With Goethe's text translated into Romanian with English supertitles, the play had a narrative semblance to the late 18th century original. But that was all. Everything about the production was designed to disturb. And the question lingering at evening's end is why? Or why not?

Isn't Faust at the heart of the Western experience? What is the value of a life? Not a biological life, but a well-lived life? Or a soul? What does it matter if we are true or untrue to our inner destiny? Do we have an inner destiny? Is Faust really a teacher, an authentic one, as the tale opens? What knowledge does he hunger for so desperately that he is willing to burn in hell? These are Goethe's questions, and in the hands of a mad Romanian director some of them intensify and some simply get lost.

The evening is so high in production value, the stage epic so affecting, the glimpse of hell that gets the audience up off its feet and walking through an opening in the stage that leads to a vast chamber behind where an utterly perverted Walpurgisnacht is underway, complete with devil-women having sex with pigs, the death of a child born of a pedophilic tryst, even more sex projected on the side of a rhinoceros...all this coupled with dancing pigs and devils moving to the beat of a sort of Romanian Philip Glass score and accompanied by a fiery roman candle waterfall...well, it's hard to say what it adds or subtracts from the Goethe experience. But there are definite additions. The hermaphrodite Mephistopheles with breasts bared and codpiece jutting presents an utterly convincing force of evil, deception and trickery.

Faust himself, a great star of the Romanian theater, guides us across the stage with every flick of his eyebrow. In the end, it may be the deathly makeup that is most disturbing, leads us deepest into hell. It's the way out that doesn't work so well. In this production Margarita, whom Faust deeply loves in Goethe and leads him toward salvation...well, she is something of an add-on, a plot device to steer the thing in another direction. And what more can one say? Unforgettable. The sort of thing Festival audiences expect, and get, in Edinburgh. And there it was the next day in the Guardian.

And here I was having my espresso in Brunswick Square, this summer evening warm but with a pleasant breeze, and even after fumbling for the change, enjoying a moment of peace. I stared into the middle distance, imagining what it would be like to live here. For a few minutes it felt good. For a few minutes life felt good.

This time is a difficult one. And for reasons that are not entirely clear I am moving. I set things up this way. And in a few days I will be back in Menlo Park sleeping in the deathbed. Which is also good. I need to return to the scene of the crime, as it were. And I need to go away again, and I will. And then I return. Go away again. And return again.